


Hot Shave

by Unovis



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Shaving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 22:09:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unovis/pseuds/Unovis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You can tell a lot about a man from the state of his strop.” <br/>An unshaven DI, a determined snake, and a straight razor. Or two.<br/>A repost to AO3 from 2010</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hot Shave

“Never?”

“Not the point, Sherlock. I saw you nick it.”

“Wordplay; you grow less manly by the sentence.”

“You stole a weapon belonging to a murderer.”

“Not a weapon. Amateur murderer; mainly a greedy fool.”

“Which doesn’t give you license to steal potential evidence.”

“He didn’t use weapons. He was a poisoner, a stunningly inept one, or he wouldn’t be dead. More important: You’ve never had a shave with a proper razor?”

Lestrade wiped his forehead with his sleeve, to keep him from stabbing the man in the throat with his housekeys. Two dead bodies over coffee in the kitchen, barely a blip on the oddness meter. Sherlock tagging along, pissing about access denied to restricted files, ten minutes in deducing not suicide, not double murder, but murder-gone-wrong; and identifying the homeowner as the cock-up killer after a prod and sniff at the bodies and a long (could say loving) prowl around the bathroom, crooning over the deceased’s shaving supplies. Then, at some time during a lecturing rant, pocketing a cut-throat razor from the collection in the medicine cabinet. “He was flustered this morning—distracted, unusually so. Fussy man, living beyond his means, inflated sense of self. Vindictive. Celibate, deluding some woman, money motive. Possibly her downstairs, check her purse for scents she isn’t wearing.” He’d been handling a strip of leather hanging next to the sink, letting it drop with a clang against the wall from its brass fittings. “You can tell a lot about a man from the state of his strop.” (Popping the final “p”, an affectation that Lestrade would like to wipe from his lips. Literally sometimes, God help him.)

“Poisoner or not; this is a crime scene, that’s private property.”

“Use your eyes! No children, no relative but an institutionalized sister. No one to claim his goods and chattels. No one to whom this trivial object is likely to afford more pleasure than it will me.” And there it was, the infernal hook. Flirting with him. The amoral, arrogant, egoistic slut. Flirting with him on the pavement, flirting with him at this broad hour of the afternoon, knowing he’d barely slept the night before, reading his face and clothes. Flirting with him, using his eyes and lips and voice and asking for “pleasure,” plucking the word like a violin string. Flirting with him, drawing his long thumb along Lestrade’s jaw and a day’s stubble, scraping his nail across to make a whiskery, whispery sound for their ears only. “Consider it my fee,” for their ears only. _I could make it worth your while_ hummed between them, unsaid. Not said because the first time Sherlock had tried that gambit on him, Lestrade had thrown him in the drunk cells overnight. Didn’t stop him from being suggestive, the serpent. Or knowing Lestrade was tempted.

He must have blinked, because there was a cab, summoned by dark arts, and Sherlock folding himself inside, calling “Leave it,” before slamming the door, before the cab took off. Lestrade shrugged, shook his head at the sergeant’s inquiring look. He was too tired to imagine what that had meant. And he could pick Sherlock’s pocket nearly as well as the consulting detective picked his.

***

Two hours of paperwork, another hour to fetch food and drag it home. He collapsed on his couch, dropping the fragrant, leaking bag holding garlic pork and Szechuan green beans on the coffee table. Hungry but too exhausted to eat just yet. He scratched his chin. Sherlock fucking Holmes. He felt again that sweep of thumb, that scrape along his jaw and pulled the razor from his jacket pocket. Didn’t look valuable. The handle was some kind of plastic. He opened it, carefully, holding it in two hands. It looked like Sherlock: elegant, sharp, and dangerous. Lestrade succumbed to that danger three—four—too many times before coming to his senses. Snake in his bed (his floor, his entryway, his sofa, his shower, his kitchen wall), a cold-blooded, quick striking, manipulative devil. Who, speaking of, conjured, was currently at his door if Lestrade knew that impatient ring and knock. If he wanted Lestrade for something case related, he’d have texted. If Lestrade refused to answer—still tired, not inclined to move—he’d, yes, he’d pick the lock and let himself in. Very focused, very disinclined to take no for an answer, his snake.

“If it bothers you so much, change your locks,” said Sherlock, striding into the living room. “You know I have keys.”

He did now. “Illegal entry,” said Lestrade. “Adding to your sheet. What do you want?” Sherlock had a small backpack slung over one arm of his suit jacket. He let it down gently next to the armchair as he swept the room with a look, floor, ceiling, walls, kitchen doorway. Every room like a crime scene to the man.

“Don’t eat yet,” he said, walking over to Lestrade. “I don’t want garlic on my skin.”

“No danger of that. Get out.” Opening move and he meant it. Sherlock bent over him and took the razor from his hands.

“You knew I’d trade.” His hand darted out and stroked the side of Lestrade’s face, nails rasping through the stubble as before. “Good. You left it on.”

Lestrade pushed his hand away. “Piss off. There’s no trade. That’s…not mine nor yours.” Weak. He should throw him out, if he could haul up and move. There was heat though, damn it, heat that built in his stomach, that he felt in the muscles of his thighs. Mind and body not cooperating. “Get out. I’m tired. I’m going to eat my stinking garlic and go to bed. Alone.”

“Oh, but my idea’s better.” Sherlock reached out again and touched Lestrade’s jaw, crouched next to the low table. The deep voice resonated, burned in his chest. “Like to see how that feels on me? Before we take it off?” On Lestrade’s swift inhalation Sherlock leaned in and kissed him; put a hand on his shoulder, pushing him gently into the couch back, and pressed his mouth against Lestrade’s, cradling his jaw now in his other hand. Lestrade sighed into the parting lips, against the tip of Sherlock’s tongue, and Sherlock talked on. “In the cleft of my arse? On the crease of my thigh?”

Christ. What Lestrade imagined, vividly, was sucking a purple mark against the inside of Sherlock’s thigh, high and tender, dark against the silky skin. Above skin hot and reddened by his beard; he sucked in air and Sherlock’s tongue with it, their mouths gone wet and hard. His hands were on Sherlock’s waist, holding his hips away, keeping him crouching there. He jerked his head to the side, breaking contact, and Sherlock rubbed his face against his cheek and jaw. It must have stung. There were dark curls along his eyebrow, tangling with his hair, and it was all he could do not to grab, to reach out and crush the snake to him, like someone real. But he wasn’t, was he? This was just…

“Just a shag, Greg. Just a sex act or two the way we like it and then a proper shave,” said the snake. Or was it his cock speaking? No, wait.

“Shave?” He dropped his hands and the seat next to him dipped under the weight of swivel-hipped detective.

“Of course. That’s the trade. The sex would be,” Sherlock shrugged, peering into the takeaway bag, “sauce. Without garlic.”

“Sauce and a shave. Go to hell, you mental reptile.”

“Only a shag, and one you want. I don’t see the difficulty. I want to feel…”

“Take the fucking razor and piss off. Go to a fetish bar; there must be one for beard burn.”

“Why, when you’re here? And ready for it. It’s a pity to waste an erection at your age.”

“Right. Consider me seduced.” He was being sarcastic. He shouldn’t laugh. He shouldn’t be as tempted as he was by the wholly insulting, heartless proposition. But he was hard, curse it, and his mouth was quirking up on one side. It had been a while. He knew the sex act (or two) would be incendiary. And he’d like nothing better now than to burn his face across every inch of that wriggling snake.

The wanker knew it, too. “Meet you on the bed. Stop thinking.” Sherlock rose and snagged the backpack from the floor on his way to the stairs.

Lestrade watched him leave. He pulled the takeaway bag to him and took out the plastic fork and the rice and the container of garlic pork.

*

Sherlock was not amused by a garlicky D.I. He sat cross-legged on the bed, working on his phone, in his shirt and trousers and socks, his jacket draped neatly over the bedroom chair—had he noticed that Lestrade liked to undress him? He noticed everything. Had he calculated how not to look ridiculous, had Lestrade not taken direction? He’d been kept waiting for ten minutes. Lestrade was more aroused than hungry and had only managed a few bites. He’d sat back and drunk a short whiskey and looked at his hands and tried to imagine not going upstairs.

But here he was, looking across his bedroom carpet to a cross mad fucker in his bed, waiting to have bristly faced sex with him and then shave him with a lethal weapon. If he understood the agenda correctly.

“That was childish,” said Sherlock, nose wrinkled. Garlic was a snake repellant, who knew? How much did Sherlock want this? Lestrade leaned against his door and watched thought move in those pale eyes. Sherlock began, “If I’d said I wanted the scent of you on my body instead…”

“Would I have been a flattered fool?” Lestrade wrinkled his brow back at him. “Now who’s the child?”

“You’re a fool for not knowing the truth when you hear it. Strong smells are a distraction.” He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt. “Go wash your hands and mouth and you can undo the rest.”

*

The snake may have had a point. He tasted fine, so fine, under Lestrade’s tongue; his skin, scoured and heated under Lestrade’s rough beard, sensitized to a pink blush in some places, a surprising red in others, changed its texture and scent. He could have grazed forever. The arch of the foot propped on Lestrade’s shoulder, the inner skin of his wrists and elbows and behind his knees—Lestrade had never been given such access before, to play, to test; but that was in the second, slower act. The first was more brutal and direct. He made the marks he’d wanted, a purple blotch the size of his mouth sucked as high as he could go inside Sherlock’s thigh, his working cheek and jaw rasping across Sherlock’s sac and the side and tip of his cock held close against his face, as Sherlock clutched his long fingers in Lestrade’s hair and arched his back and pressed his heel into Lestrade’s hip. His other heel scraped against the sheets as Lestrade sucked him into his mouth. Then Sherlock was flipped and taken from behind with chin and jaw, lips and tongue rasping over and into him, opening him, making him tight then loose, then hot, so hot, when Lestrade finally pushed inside; Sherlock was over the edge in two strokes, Lestrade in a dozen pounding more. There was a semi-circle of abraded skin where his chin had hooked over Sherlock’s shoulder and dug in.

In the in-between—as during all their in-betweens—Sherlock turned away from him. Silent and sweating, curled in on himself. Eyes closed. He looked more than ever like a snake, a white streak of back and legs, arms folded away, against the leaf-and-flower patterned sheets. White splotched with pink, this time. Lestrade didn’t touch him. He waited, as he’d waited before, for him to revive and re-engage. Cursed himself, even through the satiation and the carnal glow. Sherlock looked vulnerable, which he was not. He’d never slept here. He’d resisted being held or teased back into Lestrade’s arms. It was the disconnect, the isolation, that had convinced Lestrade that Sherlock was a vice best not indulged. “Stop thinking,” growled Sherlock, into the sheets.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“That looks sore,” he said, nodding at the shoulder, to the back of Sherlock’s head. “Let me…”

“That’s the _point_.” Sherlock rolled over, tucking the shoulder out of sight. “If you must.” He brushed his hair aside and arched his neck, his hand long under his collarbone. Lestrade edged closer and ran his lips and cheek across the offering. He stole a touch, a caress, almost, to Sherlock’s waist; and they began again.

*

Sherlock took a shower at some point. Lestrade dozed off after the second bout, after the long, languid build and shocking release. He stirred when the bed lightened and felt empty. He woke, halfway, to Sherlock climbing back in, naked, damp haired, smelling of his departed wife’s soap. And something astringent he couldn’t identify. The stained part of the sheet was rucked up between them and Sherlock turned his back to it, to Lestrade, on his side again. Not the usual fuck and flee, then. Lestrade reached across and set his hand on Sherlock’s waist. It wasn’t pushed away. He sank back to sleep.

***

He woke alone, to sun shining through the window. Half-day off; he’d been wrecked, leaving work the night before. He’d expected an early night and a sleep in. _Nobody expects Sherlock Holmes_. Sherlock’s backpack was nowhere to be seen; but he hadn’t expected much in the way of a morning greeting. Surprising he'd stayed as long as he had, into the night.

Coffee, coffee, coffee. Lestrade scrounged his boxers from the floor and a T-shirt from the clean laundry pile and pottered downstairs. He felt fine. Top of the world. Needed a shower, needed a shave; and he wondered how Sherlock felt this morning.

He could ask. In front of a plate of toast and jam and a cup of coffee sat the man himself, tapping away at Lestrade’s notebook. “Don’t bother complaining. You keep all your private files on memory sticks, locked in your desk.”

“Coffee.”

“In the pot. You’re out of milk.”

Lestrade scrubbed a hand across his chin, pouring coffee into his mug, and caught Sherlock watching him. “So, how long have you had this fascination with whiskers? And when do I get this shave?” He dropped bread in the toaster and pushed the lever down.

Sherlock finished a sequence of keystrokes and lifted a shoulder. “Curiosity. Hardly a fascination.” The pilfered razor lay on the table next to the notebook. Sherlock flicked a glance at Lestrade looking at it and back to the screen. “It wouldn’t sell for much. It’s a fine piece no longer in production. Henckels with a Solingen blade. I broke my backup and needed a replacement. Questions? Comments?”

“Curiosity satisfied? Because you don’t look to me like a happy man.”

“Fishing for compliments? You were brilliant. You were swell,” sneered Sherlock.

“You were fucking amazing,” said Lestrade. “More toast?”

The notebook lid slapped down. Sherlock looked at it, steepling his hands over it. “Go take a shower. Hot. We’ll do it down here.”

“Bathroom’s upstairs.”

“Chairs aren’t. This light’s better.”

“Look at me.” He waited until Sherlock lifted his head and scowled at him. He reached his hand out slowly and brushed his fingertips through the curls at Sherlock’s temple. “Nice to see you this morning.”

When he started up the stairs, Sherlock called behind him, “Don’t dry off your face.”

*

Putting himself in Sherlock’s hands— Sherlock’s razor-wielding hand—should qualify him for hazard pay. The position was vulnerable; leaning back in his desk chair against the kitchen sink, head tilted back, throat exposed, with Sherlock bending over him. With a hand towel wrung out in hot water on his face, his showering deemed inadequate. The backpack had contained a covered wooden bowl, a stubby shaving brush, a broad leather strop (horsehide, which Sherlock seemed pleased over), and Sherlock’s razor, longer than the stolen one. “Relax,” ordered Sherlock. Lestrade gave him a skeptical eyebrow.

The strop was anchored to the dishtowel hook. Where the production of lather was soothing and more sensuous than anything squirted from a can (badger hair brush, Sherlock noted), the sight and sound of Sherlock stropping the razor was terrifying. The thing made a noise; it almost _sang_. And the bloody man talked about it, as he worked. “If you lack the right tension in the strop, you make mistakes. You can skew the angle; you can cut the leather; you can even roll the edge of the blade, dulling it, making it necessary to be re-honed. Our murderer rolled his first razor and had to start again. Ruined a fine blade. He did well stropping his second choice until the end; his hand jerked and he dug into the strop. Had he lived, he would have regretted that keenly. In fact, it may have been on his mind through the rest of his day that was the rest of his life.”

Lestrade pulled the cloth from his mouth. “Why does it make that noise?”

“It just does,” said Sherlock, shortly. “Don’t talk. Relax your face. Open your mouth when I tell you.” Lestrade refrained from another joke. The wet heat on his face was sedating, comforting. He looked away from the razor in Sherlock’s hands to his face. His eyes, his hair, his lips. “I won’t hurt you,” said Sherlock, quietly. “Relax. This is something to enjoy.” He unwrapped the hot cloth, dropping it somewhere. He brushed the thick lather onto Lestrade’s heated skin, swirling the brush across his cheeks and jaw and throat and smoothed under his nose. He picked up the razor, held at its wicked angle, handle jutting out, blade down, and Lestrade closed his eyes.

“When you do this yourself, start at the side. You’ll take shorter strokes, at first. With the grain.”

“I…”

“No talking.” He kept a hand always on Lestrade’s face, pulling the skin taut, easing the razor’s path. With the first stroke, Lestrade could feel the clearing of his bristles, the cool, bare skin in the razor’s wake. A broad swath, the process and the feel entirely different from his electric razor. Sherlock shaved with sweeping strokes down from his ear across his cheek; shorter strokes up, to catch any stray hairs. Short, quick strokes that glided along his jaw. Sherlock’s left hand stroked, stretched, guided, guarded his face, accompanying the razor’s dance. The knife slid along his face, whispering—it made a sound, cutting along—as it moved, exciting him. It was danger controlled, conquered, contained. Sherlock. Lestrade blinked, and Sherlock stopped. He rubbed Lestrade’s cheekbone with his thumb, soothingly, and carried on. His fingers were points of contact, of pressure, and stroking planes. Strong and skilful. They felt…Lestrade lifted a hand and found Sherlock’s hip. Above, his untucked shirt, loose over his trousers, unusually informal for him. He dipped his hand under the hem and up, to make contact with skin; warm, human, smooth. He laid his fingers on his waist, as he had in the night. And Sherlock let him stay.

His chin was circled and danced over in small sections and changing angles of the blade; "Chins are different, chins are unique. You have to know them to shave them properly.” He wouldn’t dare speak, with Sherlock’s fingers firm below the corner of his mouth, but it was obvious Sherlock knew Lestrade’s chin, its every contour and curve. Observation, or sense memory from last night?

The blade flipped in Sherlock’s hand and he began shaving Lestrade’s throat, long sweeping strokes again, with the blade facing upward. Showing off? “Relax,” Sherlock said. “Trust me.” The blade dipped and skimmed and was wiped on the towel on Lestrade’s chest. Lestrade held Sherlock’s waist, anchored, and stayed statue still. Some final strokes, under the nose, small neatening touches, and he was done. Sherlock wiped off his face, turning it in his hands, looking at angles critically. No mirror offered but his own eyes and face. He squeezed something from a tube into his palm, rubbed his hands together, and smoothed it across Lestrade’s denuded skin; cooling, smarting; smelling of limes. Faintly familiar, and Lestrade tried to remember, strained to remember having smelled it on him before.

“Done,” said Sherlock, and stepped back. Lestrade took a s haky breath. He still held his waist, reluctant to let go. “The proper shave. How does it feel?” Lestrade touched his face. It felt smoother than he’d ever remembered, soft and faintly oily. It felt fine; alive.

“You tell me,” he said. Touching Sherlock in the kitchen; touching Sherlock anytime, not of necessity, not for sex, was not done. Was dangerous. He put both hands on his waist and pulled, pulled down; and the swivel-hipped snake, long of limb and graceful with it, slung a leg over and sat on him, straddling Lestrade’s thighs, facing him, knees wide at the side. That fine and lovely arse plumped right in Lestrade’s lap. Lestrade laughed, startled, and Sherlock bent forward and put his cheek to his newly shaven face. Rubbed against him, smooth to smooth.

“Good,” said Sherlock. “You feel good.” Lestrade’s arms met behind his back and pulled him close.

“Worth my while, then,” said Lestrade.

*End*

**Author's Note:**

> First posted November 23, 2010.  
> For the best straight razor information online, google Straight Razor Place. There are many vids online as well, with an abundance of cheery, round-faced, long-haired guys and a few barbers showing you how it's done.


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